w3blog

Ever wanted to convert a bitmap to vector shapes, at runtime, in Flash? Look no further. Let me introduce you to as3potrace, an ActionScript 3 library to trace bitmaps. As the name suggests, this is a port of the well known C library potrace by Peter Selinger. To be more exact, it is a AS3 [...]

Here’s a little demo of a Flex 4 component i wrote that displays a Flash IDE-like timeline for any SWF you load into it. The timeline data is reconstructed by as3swf (i discuss how that works in a previous blog post, SWF Timeline Reconstruction with as3swf). The timeline is not interactive in this demo, and [...]

I’ve been quite busy lately on both client and personal projects (can’t talk about the former, other than it being a big ass Flex 4 enterprise application i’ve been working on for the fine folks at Powerflasher; and it’s too early to talk about the latter.. stay tuned). In the last few weeks i silently [...]

So did you ever try to play Shoutcast streams in Flash? Did you run into memory leaks? Did the playback sound pitched or otherwise screwed? Fear no more. Let me introduce you to as3icy.

Open Flash CS4, create new AS3 FLA, add as3swf.swc and paste this on frame 1: import com.codeazur.as3swf.SWF; var swf:SWF = new SWF(root.loaderInfo.bytes); trace(swf); Trace output: [SWF] Header: Version: 10 FileLength: 149405 FileLengthCompressed: 149405 FrameSize: (550,400) FrameRate: 24 FrameCount: 1 Tags: [69:FileAttributes] AS3: true, HasMetadata: false, UseDirectBlit: false, UseGPU: false, UseNetwork: false [09:SetBackgroundColor] Color: #FFFFFF [86:DefineSceneAndFrameLabelData] [...]

While testing my AS3 SWF library as3swf yesterday, i found that MXMLC (the compiler that comes with the Flex SDKs)  writes undocumented SWF tags to the SWFs it produces. I was able to identify two so far: ProductInfo (Tag ID 41) The ProductInfo tag contains infos about the tool used to generate the SWF, as [...]

I need a custom installer for an AIR application i’m currently developing. That’s because my AIR app needs additional functionality that the AIR runtime doesn’t provide (specifically: detecting USB storage devices, act as a TCP socket server, talk to Last.fm scrobbler plugins). For that purpose i wrote a local RPC socket server gateway in C [...]

FZip has been around for some time now, and people seem to like it. However one feature has been asked for repeatedly: In addition to reading ZIP archive, people want to be able to create new (and modify existing) archives. So i finally sat down this weekend and added that. The code is not tested [...]

Just a quick FYI: FZip and AIRRemoteUpdater upgrades for AIR Beta 2 are now available for download. FZip now uses ByteArray.uncompress(CompressionAlgorithm.DEFLATE) instead of the now deprecated ByteArray.inflate(). I also tweaked FZip to throw an exception when a parsing error occurs and no event listener is registered for FZipErrorEvent.PARSE_ERROR events. AIRRemoteUpdater now gets the local descriptor [...]

I just released the first version of AIR Remote Updater, an AS3 class to automate remote software updates in Adobe AIR applications. It transparently checks version numbers, downloads the .AIR installer file if needed and triggers the AIR-native update process. It grabs the version number directly from the remote .AIR file without having to download [...]